The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.James Fallows, The Atlantic, January/February 2015

« As I listened to Obama (MacDill Air Force Base, 17.09.2014) that day in the airport and observed the hum of preoccupied America around me, I thought that the parts of the presidential speech few Americans were listening to were the ones historians might someday seize upon to explain the temper of our times.If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk* Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military ».http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2014/09/17/president-obama-speaks-macdill-air-force-base

* va-t-en-guerre ? A chickenhawk is a person in a position of public prominence or power who displays Aggressive support for military force / A documentable lack of combat experience

« Every institution has problems, and at every stage of U.S. history, some critics have considered the U.S. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. The difference now, I contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy.At enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. But because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work ».